Why has no one mentioned that "wine" to a Brit in 1700 meant FORTIFIED wine like Port wine or Sherry (aka 18-20% alcohol instead of 11-15%)?
The fortification of Port wine is legendarily attributed to both British tastes for sweet or "stalled mid fermentation by addition of spirits" wine, and the voyage by sea, in which normal wines suffered excessively from spoilage etc.
This is what I thought. I regularly enjoy a "modern" glass of wine, but for port wine, even a full shot glass is too much for me. It's just so heavy and sweet. The glasses depicted in the article seem to hold exactly the amount of port I would be able to comfortably drink in 10-20 minutes.
Have you tried a Sercial or Verdelho Madeira? Almost all Madeira sold is Malmsey, which is the sweetest. You'll sometimes find bottles of the Boal style, the next sweetest, sold as a digestif if the restaurant is a little more discerning.
But the best styles, IMO, are Sercial and Verdelho. Sercial is dry and Verdelho medium-dry[1], IMO have more fascinating flavors, and tend to be more acidic than the sweeter styles, which as a soda drinker I especially like. Both are really good for extended sessions as they're not nearly as cloying as Port. And the Sercial in particular suitable for drinking by the glassful with dinner if you care to splurge.
And one of the greatest things about Madeira is that it's already completely oxidized. Opinions very, but as for myself I still enjoy bottles of Madeira that I opened years ago. By contrast, IME an opened bottle of Tawny Port starts to lose its punch after a week or so (on the outside). This is why you can still buy Madeira from the 1800s and even 1700s and still enjoy it today. The oldest enjoyable Ports (Ruby or Tawny) tend to only go back 50 or 100 years if they've been preserved well.
If you're not a regular drinker (like me) or are the sole drinker in a household (like me), and don't enjoy hard liquor (like me), then the long shelf-life of opened bottles is really nice.
The Historic Series Madeiras from the Rare Wine Co are good exemplars of the various styles
I don't know if they still do, but they used to offer a 4 half bottle sample gift set.
[1] Though both still sweeter and thicker (mouth feel) than a Sherry, with less of the distilled spirits-like flavor/smell coming through--which is why I dislike Sherry.
Honestly, this really downplays Tawny. I have a half-decent bottle of a 2011 LBV Tawny Port, which is about as low quality as I will drink. I opened it probably six to nine months ago, and it's still pretty good, though obviously not at its prime.
Traveling around Spain and Portugal you can find Vintage Ports that cost about $25 and will taste absolutely amazing (though I try to stick to above 20-year oaked tawny blends). Quite a few are not very sweet, and not very heavy. Also, Vintage Port has a considerable shelf life. The oldest currently available vintage is 1815.
That's exactly what I was thinking. A modern sherry or port glass is the same size as those illustrated.
Note also,
"As a supplemental unit of apothecary measure, the wineglass (also known as wineglassful, pl. wineglassesful, or cyathus vinarius in pharmaceutical Latin) was defined as 1⁄8 of a pint, or 2 fluid ounces (2 1⁄2 fluid ounces in the imperial system).[11][12] An older version (before c. 1800) was 1 1⁄2 fluid ounces.[13] These units bear little relation to the capacity of most contemporary wineglasses, or to the ancient Roman cyathus."
The taste for fortified wine was also driven by import duties and the evasion of them. Duties were levied on the volume of alcoholic beverages, not their strength so it was relatively cheaper to import stronger drinks. Then again smuggling was rife and sneaking in more concentrated beverages was much more profitable. In fact the existence of many fortified or distilled drinks on the continent, such as Brandy/Cognac was largely driven by British import duties.
The increase in the volume poured is actually more like 4x, the article clearly explains that the glassware tax encouraged, in the region, glassware which was meant to be filled close to the brim, while modern glassware is meant to be filled to a about a third (or if you're not at a dive, often a quarter) full. Furthermore, the difference in sugar content (and overall in non-water contents) is almost as important as ethanol's share of the volume.
My wife is trained as a sommelier. In my understanding sommeliers generally figure five glasses to the bottle. (When we're pouring for ourselves, it's four glasses, because then we don't have to fight over who gets the extra glass.)
A bottle is 750 ml, so that's a 150-ml pour (five to the bottle) or 187.5-ml (four to the bottle). As the article says a typical glass holds about 450 ml now.
"For 25 years, a 26-ounce drink was the biggest soda a person could buy. Then in 1980, a shift occurred when 7-Eleven began its Big Gulp campaign. Big Gulp fountain drink cup sizes steadily rose throughout the decade and beyond, beginning at 32 ounces in 1980, then climbing to 44 ounces in 1986, 64 ounces in 1989, and a behemoth 128 ounces in 2006. Called the Team Gulp, the 128-ounce cup holds a gallon of soda."
These cups are not usually labeled with serving information. They don't, for example, have how many calories are in them because they can be filled with a variety of different sodas (some zero calorie).
FWIW, from my perception, the 128 oz is very rare, 64 oz is fairly common but a small percent of sales, and 44 oz is very common. (edit: these are for convenience stores like 7-11, not restaurants etc where sizes are much smaller)
One factor that I've noticed is that Americans love ice much more than Europeans. It's not uncommon for them to fill a cup with ice almost to the rim and then add the soda. It would be interesting to see how much actual soda most people put in those 1+ litre ups.
Ah, sorry. If you're talking about bottles, then yeah, 1~3 litres are normal here too. Single servings are either a can (330ml) or a small bottle (~500ml).
Unfortunately it's not a bottle. It's just a plastic cup with a lid and a straw. A really big plastic cup that tapers at the bottom so you can fit it in your vehicle's cupholder.
Back in the day a Royal Navy sailor's daily ration of beer was a gallon, or a half pint of 115 proof rum. I don't think the dainty wineglasses are a good indication of volume consumed.
If a sailor died of cirrhosis at 40, though, the Navy wasn’t too bothered. Alcohol is more of a heath threat these days partially because consumption has tended to rise, but also because people aren’t dying of other things as much.
> but also because people aren’t dying of other things as much.
Historical life expectancies were usually not that bad. The shortness of pre-modern life is generally grossly exaggerated, with the raw numbers being dragged down by things like infant mortality.
> Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours.
In times of great calamities like massive, prolonged wars and plagues - which some societies are more susceptible to than others [1] - things certainly turned grim, but by-and-large things weren't so bad. One way you can get a picture of this yourself is by looking at your genealogical history, which effectively lets you calculate "life expectancy from teens/early 20s", since all your ancestors were old enough to have kids. It's a somewhat selective picture, but if you fill out enough branches to the early 1700s, you can get a probably reasonable sample.
[1] And actually, Victorian England was particularly unsanitary and subject to disease - it really says something that even a plague-ridden society of people who ate arsenic and mercury still lived just as long or longer than us.
OTOH, the phrase “drink like a sailor” for heavy consumption of alcohol exists for a reason; RN alcohol rations probably aren't a good indication of society-wide consumption patterns.
The beer doesn't even count, as it was fortified with lime and was essentially water. The half pint(can we just say 'cup' now?) of rum is equal to about 5 shots worth. Not really enough to get any sailor shitfaced, but enough to take the edge off of a long shift of physical labor in a very harsh, unforgiving environment.
A pint is 20oz in the UK, and 16oz in the US. So a Half Pint is a 10oz glass (close to the normal 12oz 'Pint Glass' you get in American bars, or the standard beer bottle), and a full pint is nearly double the usual American beer serving.
Cups aren't used.
Randomly, there's a line in 1984 where a guy in a bar is lamenting the switch from Pints to Half or Full Liters, and it never made sense to me because the difference between an American pint and a half liter is ~5%, in the noise. But to the original audience, it's more like 18%.
Also, a half liter is larger than an American pint (473 mL) but smaller than a UK pint (568 mL - UK fluid ounces are smaller than US fluid ounces). And I would imagine that prices wouldn't go down when they switched from imperial pints to half-liters.
Flying a lot around Europe I'm always surprised by how full the British side of things fills a wineglass :-) 125 ml is normal in the majority of places, 180 ml is a British glass of wine. The article is from the UK...
But both 125 and 180 ml servings are considerably less than the size of the glass, so the article title is at best clickbaity. The glass got bigger but nobody is pouring 7x as much wine per serving as before.
And also in the UK, they generally pour your wine glass up to the top (no idea why) whereas in France it's always served with about a 1/4 of the glass.
In the U.S. it’s kind of a joke. Bartenders will tease that a typical globe can in fact hold 20oz of wine, almost an entire bottle. You might not think so looking at it. So when you ask for a “half glass”, it’s a joke.
But very few would actually pour 20oz. The globe is designed to be filled only partially, to allow aeration.
Modern wine glasses are designed for drinking experience and you are supposed to hold the glass using your fingers from it's stem. And that's exactly why you don't fill half of your glass and try to carry 250 milliliters of liquid with your fingers.
How do you know? A British pub can be anything from a squalid shabeen to a comfortable community space to a restaurant that happens to sell beer.
In the UK, wine by the glass can only be legally served in measures of 125ml, 175ml or multiples thereof. The vast majority of pubs today only sell 175ml and 250ml measures.
A few decades ago, asking for "a glass of red wine" would have got you a 125ml glass unless you specifically asked for a large glass, which would be 175ml. Gradually, the default moved to 175ml and the 125ml "small" glass was phased out in favour of the 250ml "large" glass, with 175ml becoming the new "small".
It's abundantly clear that there's been a vast increase in the quantities of wine drunk over the past few decades. Wine consumption has contributed to the legitimisation of heavy drinking amongst the middle-aged and middle-class. Drinking several large glasses of wine doesn't carry the same stigma as drinking several pints of strong beer. As a result, we've seen a quadrupling of chronic liver disease, with the increase mainly being seen in middle-aged, middle-class and disproportionately female drinkers.
Around 40% of deaths from liver disease are attributable to alcohol consumption, so I'm not sure how an increase in wine drinking within one age group could be the main cause of a 400% increase in liver disease.
> These days, the average British pour of wine is 250 milliliters, “larger than the mean capacity of wine glasses available in the 1980s,” writes Marteau.
Wow that’s a big pour - you expect to get 4-5 glasses of wine out of a standard 750ml bottle, potentially a little more than that if you’re ordering by the glass in a restaurant.
The article misquotes its source. The study states "wine is increasingly served in 250 mL servings" (emphasis mine), not that the average pour size has become 250ml!
250ml is a typical carafe size. Carafes are a more common way to serve wine in Europe, compared to ordering two separate glasses.
Even if true, this does not support the claim that Britains consume significantly more wine than in 1700. (Which may be true but it’s not supported.) If anything it would suggest that higher end wine is sold by the glass or bottle... again the source does not claim otherwise.
As a side note, at least here in Italy, serving a glass of wine at a restaurant is a relatively recent use (say in the last 15-20 years) new thing (most probably "imported" from other countries).
Until then you either ordered a bottle (around 75 cl) or some "house" wine, served in (measured) of either 25 cl (a quarter, "un quartino") 50 cl (a half liter, "un mezzo") or 100 cl (a liter, "un litro"), that looked like these:
Or, in many places, wine was "a consumo" (upon consumption?) where the waiter would bring on the table a full "fiasco" (large bottle of wine, usually 1.75 l) and then estimate how much of it you emptied when it came to calculate the bill.
In any case normally each person would drink no more than "un quartino", no matter the size of the glass.
To me, this indicates that the pattern of wine drinking has changed over the years, not the quantity.
"A glass of wine with you, sir" was a friendly thing to say at the table, and resulted in both parties filling and downing an entire glass. The small glasses seem to be a way of carrying that on over the course of a large meal with a dozen people without any of them actually dying.
Accounts of those meals also talk of going through around 2 bottles of wine per participant. In the article photo, the bottle looks about the same as it does today.
I'll start off echoing what others have been saying... ports and madeiras were more popular. They resisted spoiling due to the high alcohol/sugar content. They can kick like a mule, so you can't just down 250ML in a sitting.
Wine glasses are also fragile. A lot of places serve wine in common water glasses of roughly the same size. Italians have been doing that forever.
Bigger glasses are more fragile, but they greatly enhance aeration and aroma. The smell of wine is over 50% of the experience for me. If i'm trying to maximize the experience of a good bottle, I'll use ridiculously large Riedel Vinum Old World glasses : https://www.amazon.com/Riedel-Veritas-World-Pinot-Glass/dp/B...
They're enormous, fragile, a pain in the behind to wash. However It's tough to go back to standard wine glasses after you try one.
All in all, I would say glasses are getting bigger in some cases, but the article is totally missing the how and why of it.
FWIW, Sercial (dry) and Verdelho (medium-dry) Madeiras, sporting less sugar and nice acidity, can be quite quaffable. The acidity also helps, I think, to mask the stronger alcohol content. Those styles are really hard to find, though, as both cheap and expense Madeiras tend to be of the Malmsey style and only slightly less cloying than Port. The second most common style is Boal, which is less sweeter than Malmsey but lacks the acidity.
This references the study showing that people eat more when using larger plates, but I think wine drinking is the one instances where those results aren't easily transferrable.
Wine glasses today are usually filled to about 1/4, where (judging by the painting in the article, and my guess) glasses 1/7th the size of today's were filled to the rim.
Exactly. The photos in the article even show this. The modern glasses shown in the article clearly aren't filled with 7x1700-size servings each, otherwise they'd be drinking literally thimbles worth of wine in the 1700's.
Restaurants do tend to pour only part of a glass, usually 100-175 mL, depending on location, quality of wine, and country. However, I've seen plenty of people in a home environment pour to the top, or at least 2/3 of the glass, they're usually counting their drinks by the bottle though, rather than the glass.
some anecdata - I spilled an oversized glass of red wine our carpet ina previous house and escalated my wife's 'need' for wooden floors by unknown to immediate. :-)
on a side note we were much happier with the wooden floor
This is quiet meaningless, almost an Onion article. Nobody serves a 449ml wine pour. Just because the glasses have gone larger, does not mean the serving size has too. The photo that says it was probably 14 servings back in the day, the glass is not even filled to a third of its capacity.
This is an interesting dynamic. First they made things much bigger and now they are trying to deliver less at the same price. It would be interesting to see how decisions for pricing and size are made.
Eventually the elastic snaps on product downsizing and they relaunch a new "king size" or "sharing" product.
For example, the Mars Bar in the UK grew from 49g to 65g then shrank back down to 51g, but they also launched an 84g king size bar. After complaints from the regulators, the king size bar was replaced by "Mars Duo" - two 42g bars in the same pack, ostensibly designed for sharing.
Cheaper ingredients can also be substituted by redesigning the product. The chocolate on a Mars bar is thinner than it used to be and the nougat has an airier texture, maintaining product size while reducing ingredient cost. Many chocolate manufacturers have increased the number of SKUs with inclusions like cookie or honeycomb pieces. Sugar, flour and air are cheaper than cocoa, but it feels like you're getting more for your money than if you'd bought a plain chocolate bar.
Confectioners have become exceptionally good at aeration it seems. 8 years or more ago the UK high street confectioner Thorntons served lovely chocolates, now they're all aerated foam with a thin shell of chocolate flavoured wax, they honestly turn my stomach whilst once-upon-a-time I'd happily eat a whole box. Of course one's own taste for sweets changes but I think they're more to blame.
Once Kraft took over Cadbury we got recipe changes - palm oil - to the standard chocolate; and lots of new bars with inclusions, as you mention, in order to reduce the amount of chocolate but keep the bulk.
Nearly all ice-cream now in UK supermarkets seems to boast "soft scoop" which is just the aeration AFAICT, meaning you get "half" the volume of actual ingredients (except air) in the same tub.
This sort of cheating with foods seems to have accelerated since the recession.
It's also interesting how difficult they can make comparing sizes/prices for even the simplest things, like for example toilet paper.
Even comparing similar quality rolls with each other can sometimes be quite a math exercise, as different manufacturers sell different numbers of rolls, with different numbers of sheets, sometimes even in different sizes per sheet.
So how to calculate the best value toilet paper? Based on sheets? Based on average area of paper you get per roll?
And who wants to do all that when you are simply looking for something to, literally, wipe your butt with?
Sometimes I think having choices can be a really bad non-choice.
I saw the Toblerone there and something clicked in my head. A friend brought back a large Toblerone from the UK (I live in Canada) and I noticed that there were rather large gaps between the peaks. The gaps between the peaks on a Toblerone sold here in Toronto are too small to fit a child's finger.
I have heard that such small glasses were a) somewhat necessary due to the difficulty of glassmaking in the 1700s, and b) not a problem when you have servants following you around keeping your glasses topped up.
Huh. This explains something I've been wondering about for a while: I thought I had remembered figuring that a bottle of wine (standard 750 mL) was good for about six glasses. But at a recent event I helped host, the wine caterers said to count on about four pours per bottle. I assumed I had just misremembered, but "six per bottle" seems in line with what others in the thread are suggesting was more typical a couple decades ago, and it's just more confirmation that standard serving size has gone up....
Didn’t they drink out of wine skins? Cheaper, more sturdy than glass.. and beer was drunk from wooden tankards, 4 pints in size unearthed, probably 2000 years ago in wales.
>When full, the tankard would have held nearly four pints of beer or cider. It was held in two hands and was probably passed around a group as a communal drinking vessel. //
Wonder how this compares to the increased size of tablewear or portion sizes in general. In the age of 64oz soda's and XL meal size options, seems wine glasses would increase at a similar rate.
> For regulators keeping a worried eye on increased drinking, Marteau suggests encouraging the use of smaller glasses. After all, water is a bit safer to drink these days.
Can you please stay out of it? Just because port glasses from the 1700s have less overall volume than tasting glasses from the 2010s, doesn't mean it's anyone's job to say how big they should be. At most, the volume of the pour has increased by maybe a factor of four, while (compared to the wine that went in the 60ml glasses) the alcohol content has decreased in a single step, from fortified to straight.
It is always funny to see Americans using huge (as in HUGE) glasses to drink wine, believing that it is the French distinguished way of tasting wine, and being disappointed when they discover that French people just use regular/smallish glasses in any context.
No, it is just Americans confusing 'big' for 'refined' as usual :-) (and bigger for more refined, and even bigger for super classy).
Err, no - we’re pretty well aware that those glasses are a modern improvement from California. There are many good reasons for drinking the same 4-5oz of wine out of a nice big modern cab glass, pretending to be more French is definitely not one fo them.
As with everything, it's a trend. If you served dinner with a smaller wine glass (an XL5, for example), some people would wonder if you'd missed a memo. Gets a bit silly. Larger glasses allow for more surface area, sure, but they're impractically delicate to use and clean.
But then, if you think that's silly, consider jeans. For almost everyone in a Western country, if you left the house in jeans with a really unfashionable wash (acid, stone, etc) it's likely that people would be astonished. I know circles where you'd be ridiculed for life. Not the item of clothing, the cut, cleanliness or necessarily even the colour, but just the treatment of the dyed material. We're pretty ridiculous...
You say that, but this includes friends raising it routinely at the pub and things like that. If not jeans, I think any social circle would have an equivalent reaction for another fashion faux pas, even if it was more dramatic like wearing flared pants or overalls.
Most people in the US go to a specialty retailer if they need wine glasses, and a nice one has Riedel or something comparable. The sales associate will invariably say "oh this is made to enjoy red Bordeauxs, this one is for white Burgundies, etc, etc" and they will be nudged to go fancy. I don't know if they go in with the expressed plan to buy an enormous wine glass set, but just look at https://www.riedel.com/restaurant/collection/d/sommeliers/bo..., it's 30 oz. I think it's fair to say there is an element of industry pushing consumer demand in a more expensive direction. Also, I think it's fair to point out Riedel is European and has been around for 250 years.
Also, even if I was presented with that wine glass, I would expect nothing more than a standard pour. I don't think you're being entirely fair to Americans in this particular case (even if a number of them would be happy with a pint of wine).
> Most people in the US go to a specialty retailer if they need wine glasses
[citation needed]
If I were going to bet, I'd say most purchasers of wine glasses probably do it through general retailers like Target or Amazon, not specialty retailers.
I would be less surprised if the greatest number of consumer purchases of wineglasses were from specialty retailers because the people who buy from them but more glasses per person, but I really doubt most people use a specialty retailer.
You got me. I have no idea, and I'm not invested enough to find out. I'd assumed Williams-Sonoma or something comparable. Let the record show that Target sells Riedel, too.
> Also, I think it's fair to point out Riedel is European and has been around for 250 years.
It’s fairly common for companies to make different things for different markets, though. GM is American, and a century or so old, but didn’t exactly sell many Opel Corsas in the US, say. (For the sake of pedanticism, as of this year Opel is no longer a GM brand, but anyway...)
I think the large wine glasses have less to do with imitating the French, and more to do with the belief that they enhance the experience of drinking red wines.
Also, you seem to be suggesting here that since the French don't do it, then it isn't refined. Perhaps you are the one who is confused about the definition of "refined"?
